How Radiohead's Most Alienating Album Got Its Cover

Hint: it involved knives.

When putting together their record Kid A, Radiohead were under a lot of pressure to deliver. They had come out of the gates as a kind of alternative-rock band with loner anthem "Creep" in 1992, and then made a bigger, more experimental splash with OK Computer in 1997. Expectations were high, as critics and audience were lauding the band for both their political, nihilistic views of humanity and their ability to write killer guitar leads. In some ways, Kid A, released in 2000, is an obvious follow-up to OK Computer; it's darker, weirder, and more cynical. But for many, the record's more experimental tone was alienating. Where were the hooks? (On "National Anthem," if you must ask.) Where were the choruses of disillusion and teenage angst we can all belt out at amateur karaoke night?

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The album was a critical success, though, and has since been hailed as one of Radiohead's finest efforts. Stanley Donwood, who has worked on every single Radiohead album cover since their debut, was charged with the task of creating album art that matched the dystopian nightmare of the music the art would adorn. Donwood had already created two memorable covers for the band, and was known for his outside-the-box ideas. For The Bends, he filmed a CPR training mannequin using video cassettes and then photographed the footage. With OK Computer, he used a light pen, a computer, and a tablet to sketch the otherworldly highways of the cover, and operated under a strict policy of "no erasing." The eventual cover for Kid A, with all of its jagged lines and weird balance of digital and analog art formats, was a completely different beast.

It might not be much of a surprise then that Donwood's methods were a little abstract, and maybe a little violent. He had a theme in mind that he wanted to convey: "The overarching idea of the mountains was that they were these landscapes of power, the idea of tower blocks and pyramids. It was about some sort of cataclysmic power existing in landscape." Naturally, getting such themes onto a canvas would involve, um, knives. "I got these huge canvases for what became Kid A and I went mental using knives and sticks to paint with and having those photographed and then doing things to the photographs in Photoshop," he would later recall. While Donwood's methods fall somewhere in between wonderfully inventive and borderline psychopathic, the resulting print is a thing of beauty. It's simplistic, in a sense, but also daring and ominous. Somehow, he captured the otherworldly tone of Kid A and, by all accounts, didn't stab Thom Yorke in the process.